Mummy with syphillis revealed to be Boris Johnson relation

Undated handout image issued by SRF of a mummy discovered in a Swiss church which has reportedly been identified by scientists as an ancestor of Boris Johnson. PRESS ASSOCIATION Photo. Issue date: Thursday January 25, 2018. Anna Catharina Bischoff is said to be the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother of the British Foreign Secretary. The 230-year-old unknown mummy was discovered four decades ago during excavations of Barfusser church in Basel. See PA story HISTORY Johnson. Photo credit should read: SRF/PA Wire''NOTE TO EDITORS: This handout photo may only be used in for editorial reporting purposes for the contemporaneous illustration of events, things or the people in the image or facts mentioned in the caption. Reuse of the picture may require further permission from the copyright holder.

The mystery behind the identity of a syphilis-riddled women whose mummified body was buried beneath a Swiss church has finally been solved after puzzling experts for 40 years.

A team of international scientists carried out genetic analysis of the body – only to discover the woman is an ancestor of Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson. She is his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother.

The body was unearthed in 1975 while renovations were being carried out at the Barfüsser church in Basel.

The remains were well preserved because of a high mercury content, which often signifies a person had been treated for syphilis – it was standard treatment for the sexually transmitted disease from the late 1400s, though was deadly in itself.

The burial site, in front of the church’s altar, indicated that the corpse belonged to an ­individual with high status. But there was no gravestone, and her identity was unknown.

Local historians were aware that members of Basel’s wealthy families were buried in and around the church. Some were named in records and some had clearly marked gravestones. But not the ­mummy.

The real breakthrough came when recently discovered archives revealed the body had been dug up once before, in 1843.

Those records led researchers to suspect the woman was a member of the prominent Bischoff family.

Now researchers at Basel’s Natural History Museum have confirmed her genealogy and pinpointed her identity.

DNA extracted from the mummy’s toe revealed she is Anna Catharina Bischoff, who was born in 1719.

She married a pastor and gave birth to seven children, though only two of them survived to adulthood.

She spent most of her life in Strasbourg but moved back to Basel for her final five years.

She had contracted syphilis, possibly through treating sufferers of the disease, and it was likely the mercury treatment that caused her death in 1787.